Shayne Elliott says he has been asked often whether his decision to shift to agile methodology to organise work at ANZ Banking Group will mean staff can wear jeans and T-shirts to work.

"I get asked that a lot. Probably, as long as they wear shoes," the ANZ chief executive says of the bank's plans to adopt agile work processes.

The question is shallow, the answer appropriately flippant. But what could be more symbolic of change than an army of navy suited bankers replaced by squads of ANZ staff in hoodies riding scooters to work?

In fact, the goal of implementing agile across the bank, excluding branches, announced on Tuesday, is that it becomes "a huge culture change program", said Mr Elliott.

"It's about saying the culture has to be about openness, transparency, collaboration, focus. All of those things come to the fore. It's about customer focus, getting things done, accountability. So a big chunk of this is about communicating all of that, making sure we have the right people who can live and succeed in that culture."

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Lack of Empowerment

He says the experience of agile at ING has been that employee engagement takes a big step forward.

"What do staff complain about, talk about in whatever forum we have? It's the lack of empowerment. They use different words, they talk about bureaucracy or frustration with this or that. But most people come to work and they just want to be able to get things done."

The original Agile Manifesto written in 2001 by a bunch of software developers, promoted "individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan".

Since then, agile has gone mainstream. The values, principles, practices, and benefits are spreading to many industries, according to an article in Harvard Business Review in May 2016.

"By taking people out of their functional silos and putting them in self-managed and customer-focused multidisciplinary teams, the agile approach is not only accelerating profitable growth but also helping to create a new generation of skilled general managers," the authors wrote.

Career disruption

But there are massive challenges. Mr Elliott and the woman he has anointed to lead the changes, head of product Kath Bray, have a monumental task in the implementation. They aim to remove layers of reporting lines populated by team managers with little autonomy, with autonomous multidisciplinary squads, coaches and tribes.

Widespread career disruption is inevitable. Job numbers, declining around 10 per cent through natural attrition, will continue to track down.

The dangers of adopting agile without really understanding it are, however, that the vestiges of the old control structures are retained as an overlay across agile squads, creating dissonance and competing priorities that befuddle individuals trying to get work done. The authors advocate starting small and letting the agile method spread organically.

Another obstacle may be that ANZ has not upgraded its core banking platform, considered one of the ticking time bombs left by former chief executive Mike Smith.

Right timing

But Mr Elliott says the debate has moved on. "Like any part of technology the longer you wait there are more options that are available that are better and cheaper than the ones before. But you can't wait too long because then you die, so it's about getting the timing right. What we believe today is that our technology, our new strategy, and the way we are thinking and the way we are working give us way more options about what to do with our core system and that the old way of thinking of saying that we have to replace the core infrastructure is exactly that old way of thinking. And it is far more about the componentry, in its own way being a bit more agile, rather than saying its this big infrastructure replacement."

A big motivation for the culture change is ANZ's pressing need to attract software engineers. It would hardly be considered the most desirable employer among talented software developers.

As Mr Elliott admitted in an interview on Monday, if software engineers, who learn agile at university, "come into the workforce and we plonk you into traditional hierarchies, you can imagine we are not the most attractive place to work. There is an employee proposition here as well."